The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose

“That’s what my life was about: becoming so hard no one would mess with me. No one would come here, to my house, and hurt my mother.”

Wilson watches his mother suffer at the hands of her abuser-boyfriend, whom Wilson calls “the cop.” Wilson believes he should have done more to help her when he saw the cop repeatedly punching her. Bullied by his older brother Derrick, Wilson believes he is too soft, so he collects as many guns as he can.

“Some guys were working. There was a kid in the next dayroom over, for instance, always reading. I figured he was a short-timer, in for jaywalking or something, because he was neat, and his clothes looked rich. Then someone told me he had life.”

The young man in the dayroom at Patuxent prison is Steve Edwards, who will become Wilson’s tutor, inspiration, and best friend. This is the book’s first reference to Steve. Initially, Wilson thinks the man reading in the dayroom is a fool. After all, what is the point of trying to improve himself when he is in prison for life? This encounter inspires Wilson to begin thinking about his goals and his legacy.

“They call it rock bottom, like it’s a hard floor you go crashing into and stop. But here’s the thing: There’s no floor. You only see it that way later, because rock bottom isn’t a place. You can always go lower. Rock bottom is a decision. It’s the moment you decide to stop falling and take control of your life.”

When Mom stops taking his calls, and when Leslie tells him the family owes him nothing, Wilson decides to stop reaching out, stop trying to stay connected to his old life, and finally take control. This is the first paragraph of the first chapter of Part 3, entitled “The Master Plan.”

“It wasn’t a complicated message. My brain was saying: Don’t give in to temptation, not even once. Don’t cut corners or do anything that could lead to trouble, even if I could get away with it. One mistake, and I’d be living my other nightmare: the helpless old man in a prison cell.”

Having put together his Master Plan to improve himself and get out of prison, Wilson has a persistent nightmare. In the dream, he is in his old bedroom at Grandma’s house on Division Avenue. There are four drawers at the base of the bed. He reaches into one of the drawers and is bitten by a snake. From then on, Wilson avoids every form of temptation, from junk food to female COs offering sex.

“It’s the action, not just the reward. It’s being the artist, not just admiring the view. That’s the endgame. Do you understand?”

When he begins putting together his Master Plan, Wilson includes items such as cars he wants to purchase and experiences he wants to enjoy. He soon realizes, however, that these are rewards, and there is a difference between work and reward. He concludes that the work itself is part of the reward.

“Steve looked away down the tier, like he hadn’t dropped a bomb.”

After Wilson earns a GED and then a certificate in vocational woodworking, he feels good and believes he is making a case for early release. Steve, however, drops a truth “bomb” by telling Wilson that he is only doing these things for himself and that he could be doing a great deal for other inmates as well. The next time Wilson updates his Master Plan, it includes an existing item, “Start my own business,” with the addendum “that makes people’s lives better” (158). This quotation supports the theme of the Importance of Setting Goals. As a sign that Steve is helping Wilson take yet another step beyond the narrow mindset of his teenage years, this quotation also supports the theme of Appearance and Reality.

“But it wasn’t an excuse. That’s the biggest thing I had to accept: Yes, I was traumatized, and I had PTSD, and I was lost and depressed and young as hell–but I’d still made those decisions. All my wounds and all that anger: They were part of me. And if I was going to be a better man, I had to take responsibility for what that part of me had done.”

Reflecting on his crime, Wilson acknowledges accountability for having taken a life. This is a difficult passage because later in the book, in a chapter entitled “Remorse,” Wilson admits that “even now,” after his release from prison, he is “not fully willing to say that the killing was my fault” (202). It is important, therefore, to read this passage not as a simple acceptance of blame but as an expression of determination to take responsibility.

“What’s your endgame? That’s not just a question. It’s the only question that matters. Because if you’re heading in the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how many steps you take. You’re already lost.”

Wilson explains the importance of a Master Plan. Thinking only of women, cars, and money leads many young men astray. Creating a Master Plan (and following it) is about acquiring rewards that make you happy but doing so in the context of pursuing a passion and building a legacy.

“On the other hand, nobody celebrated the judge if the person went on to a remarkable life. Almost nobody would know. So my best chance was catching the right judge, at the right moment, when the heat was low.”

When he meets the young lawyer Keith Showstack, who agrees to take his case pro bono, Wilson learns that he faces obstacles beyond the written law. From the mid-1990s onward, public opinion had been hostile to life prisoners, particularly those convicted of murder. Judges seldom release violent offenders, even reformed ones, for fear of receiving blame if those prisoners commit fresh crimes. Patience and timing, therefore, are essential. As a reminder of the political forces that often keep people behind bars, this quotation supports the theme of Structural Oppression.

“It would have been easy to come out of my ethics and modern American history classes angry, especially when I was living the practical effect of hundreds of years of racist policy. And I did feel frustration, I can’t lie on that. But what I took away, more than anything, was the fire of Frederick Douglass.”

Thanks to Steve’s efforts, Patuxent offers college courses. Wilson studies history and comes to admire the 19th-century abolitionist and civil rights pioneer Frederick Douglass, a former slave who taught himself to read, escaped to the North, and led the fight for both freedom and equality. Wilson finds encouragement in Douglass’s belief that knowledge equals freedom. In fact, between the foreword and prologue, Wilson’s book features a lengthy passage from Douglass’s first autobiography in which Douglass recalls the first time he heard his master chastise his wife for teaching young Frederick to read—a skill, the master insists, that will make the boy unfit for slavery. As a reminder of an ugly history with present-day consequences, this quotation supports the theme of Structural Oppression. On the pitfalls of ignorance and the possibilities of enlightenment, this quotation also supports the theme of Perception Versus Reality.

“This dude was dope. He came from the lowest place imaginable, a slave shack on the eastern shore. He raised himself through education. And when he became rich and famous, he turned around and tried to lift his entire race up with him.”

Like the previous quotation, this passage refers to Frederick Douglass. Here Wilson recognizes two additional connections between himself and the 19th-century hero he admires. First, Douglass was born in Maryland, where Wilson lived most of his young life and was now imprisoned. Second, Douglass spent his life improving himself and then focused his energies on helping others: slaves and free blacks.

“The system was cruel. Every rule, every physical space, every interaction with staff was designed to humiliate. Their goal, every day, was to prove that we were nothing.”

Instead of putting the profits from Wilson’s successful photo business into the youth program as promised, the Patuxent prison administration uses the money to purchase new security cameras. Wilson reflects on the administration’s betrayal in the context of a broader system designed to dehumanize inmates.

“I wasn’t a monster. But I did do something monstrous. I took a life. The hardest part was acknowledging that, if I wasn’t a monster, despite what I’d done, then neither was the man I had killed.”

After years of therapy, Wilson begins to view the man he killed not as an enemy who deserved to die but as a fellow cave-dweller—angry, lost, and abandoned as Wilson himself had been. The theme of Perception Versus Reality bears not only on Wilson’s understanding of himself and society but also his understanding of the man he killed.

“Remorse isn’t feeling bad about what you have done. It’s not ‘accepting responsibility.’ I had done that years before. Remorse is bigger. It is acknowledging that you did something irrevocably wrong, followed by the overwhelming feeling that you need to dedicate your life to making up for that sin.”

Wilson first experiences the feeling of remorse when he imagines the man he killed lying on the ground, bleeding to death, and “probably crying for his mom” (204). As a reminder that remorse has the power to liberate a person from hatred, this quotation supports the theme of Perception Versus Reality. As a signal of Wilson’s forward-looking dedication to atonement, it also supports the theme of The Importance of Goals.

“But there was something I missed the first four times I read the story: The man wasn’t recaptured. He wasn’t forced to return. He went there of his own free will, to teach the truth to those left behind. To tell them the shadows weren’t real and there was a better life.”

After Judge Serrette reduces Wilson’s sentence, the Patuxent administration makes things more difficult for Wilson and other inmates. In this context, Wilson thinks of himself in terms of the philosopher in Plato’s allegory of the cave who voluntarily returns to the cave. The idea of teaching the truth to those in the case supports the theme of Perception Versus Reality. As a reminder that Wilson’s Master Plan requires that he volunteer to help those who are struggling, this quotation supports the theme of the Importance of Goals.

“‘It’s your fault,’ my caseworker told me.”

In the Baltimore halfway house, a midpoint between incarceration and freedom, Wilson’s caseworker blames him for his mother’s suicide. The caseworker appears to be provoking Wilson in hopes that he would react in anger and give them an excuse to return him to Patuxent.

“It’s easy to fall into hopelessness when stuff like that happens. To become overwhelmed by the problems of poverty and inexperience.”

As a program director for a nonprofit working in the poor and predominantly Black neighborhood of Barclay, west of downtown Baltimore, Wilson schedules job interviews, but sometimes the prospective employees fail to show. On one such occasion, Wilson encounters a young woman on her way to an interview several weeks after it was scheduled, and she is crestfallen to learn that the job already went to someone else.

“Challenging cops, even when they’re wrong, is risky. This is how black men get thrown in prison for ‘resisting arrest.’ But I was afraid.”

Driving through a predominantly white neighborhood in Wilson’s black Corvette, Wilson and his friend are pulled over by police officers who insist on searching the car’s trunk. When Wilson reminds them that they have no constitutional right to do so, they respond that they will search the trunk one way or the other. Wilson calls a friend on the police force who arrives at the scene, persuades Wilson to open the trunk, and de-escalates a tense situation.

“If my mom was out in the audience today […] I would say to her, I only been home eighteen months. I am a student at the University of Baltimore with a full scholarship. I am the owner of two successful businesses. I am the director of a workforce program for Greater Homewood, and my mission is to lead people out of the figurative cave and show them that despite all the things you’re going through, despite how hard life is, the world is beautiful.”

This is part of what Wilson said on NPR’s Stoop Stories, which he recorded on December 19, 2013. Wilson makes a direct reference to the cave and cites his extensive achievements. This quotation, therefore, supports the themes of Perception Versus Reality and The Importance of Goals.

“Steve told me that the hearing was a last resort for the state. He was on the verge of getting a new trial based on Columbia’s medical findings. The state was worried the evidence of PTSD and brain trauma would set a precedent that would allow hundreds, maybe thousands, of inmates and accused criminals in similar situations to go free or have their sentences reduced. By releasing him through a hearing, they sealed his medical records so that no other prisoners could benefit from those years of work.”

Medical research showed that Steve suffered severe brain trauma at the age of 14 when he was attacked with a crowbar. As a result, Steve began to experience paranoia and act violently—a marked contrast with his usual demeanor. The scientific evidence was enough to show that Steve did not belong in prison. Nonetheless, the state sought to ensure that other prisoners in a similar situation remained behind bars.

“‘Oh,’ she said, and walked on. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was thinking about the same thing I was: the day she came to the mental health ward at Patuxent to rub my face in her power, and I said, One day, I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to be more successful than you, and that’s going to be my revenge.”

Wilson’s former caseworker sees him wearing a suit and leaning against his Corvette at a construction site, where Wilson informs her that he owns the company. The caseworker had hassled, insulted, and baited Wilson in hopes of keeping him in prison. Wilson now gets his revenge.

“I like Dr. Carter. She’s a good person. But when she said I was a success story for this institution I could hear the echo of her last words as I left for the halfway house: Remember, Inmate Wilson, you are the property of the state of Maryland.”

Dr. Carter, whom Wilson describes as “the grandmotherly African American therapist I had known for years” (252) invites Wilson to return to Patuxent and speak to inmates about the Master Plan that helped him earn his release. The fact that she casually refers to Wilson as “property” and attributes his success to “this institution” shows that she perhaps has adopted some of the attitudes that support the theme of Structural Oppression.

“The cops had pulled out of the black areas, possibly on the mayor’s orders, and when that happened, black Baltimore collapsed.”

In April 2015, following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died from injuries suffered while in police custody, Baltimore descended into chaos. Here Wilson highlights the ambiguous relationship between the Baltimore police and the city’s black communities. On one hand, decades of racial profiling by aggressive and corrupt officers had helped produce the atmosphere of tension in which the 2015 uprising occurred. On the other hand, when police and civilian authorities abdicate their responsibilities, criminals and violent gangs take over the streets, leaving citizens to defend their homes and businesses as best they can.